Thursday, 31 March 2016

Laini Taylor's 'Strange The Dreamer' Cover + Prologue Reveal!

Today is an exciting day for Laini Taylor fans! First off, if you have yet to read her 'Daughter of Smoke and Bone' trilogy, do please make your way to the nearest bookshop or library and get that reading underway, because it's without a doubt one of my favorite fictional worlds.

But today is all about Laini's new duology, 'Strange The Dreamer'! If you haven't heard anything about it yet, here is the teasing blurb we have at the moment:

Strange the Dreamer is the story of:

the aftermath of a war between gods and mena mysterious city stripped of its namea mythic hero with blood on his handsa young librarian with a singular dreama girl every bit as perilous as she is imperiledalchemy and blood candy, nightmares and godspawn, moths and monsters, friendship and treachery, love and carnage.

Welcome to Weep.

Laini's website offers a bit more of information, and I am absolutely in love with the concept: "There
was a war between gods and me, and men won. The few surviving children
of the gods have grown up in hiding, dreading the day they know must
come: when humans find them, and end them.

Today was the cover reveal for both the US and UK editions of the book, being released this September by Hodder & Stoughton, and they managed to make me even more curious about how this plot is going to be unfolding.

Here they are, in all their glory! UK on the left, US on the right.

Gorgeous, aren't they? I can't wait to have a copy of it and see how it looks like physically! (and possibly pet it quite a few times. Am I the only one feeling like it's going to be one of those books? No? Carry on then.)

But the goodies do not stop here! Have an exclusive look at the book's Prologue:

On the second sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city
of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.

Her skin was blue, her blood was red.

She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on
impact, and there she hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer
swooning on a lover’s arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point,
protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as
her ghost shook loose, and then her hands relaxed, shedding fistfuls of freshly
picked torch ginger buds.

Later, they would say these had been hummingbird
hearts and not blossoms at all.

They would say she hadn’t shed blood
but wept
it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that
she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would
say a flock of moths had come, frantic, and tried to lift her away.

That was true. Only that.

They hadn’t a prayer, though. The moths were no
bigger than the startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could
only pluck at the strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged,
sodden with her blood. They were purled away with the blossoms as a grit-choked
gust came blasting down the street. The earth heaved underfoot. The sky spun on
its axis. A queer brilliance lanced through billowing smoke, and the people of
Weep had to squint against it. Blowing grit and hot light and the stink of saltpeter.
There had been an explosion. They might have died, all and easily, but only
this girl had, shaken from some pocket of the sky.

Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her
pockets were all full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and
dead.

She was also blue.

Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or
dragonfly wings, or a spring—not summer—sky.

Someone screamed. The scream drew others. The
others screamed, too, not because a girl was dead, but because the girl was
blue, and this meant something in the city of Weep. Even after the sky stopped
reeling, and the earth settled, and the last fume spluttered from the blast
site and dispersed, the screams went on, feeding themselves from voice to
voice, a virus of the air.

The blue girl’s ghost gathered itself and perched,
bereft, upon the spearpoint-tip of the projecting finial, just an inch above
her own still chest. Gasping in shock, she tilted back her invisible head and
gazed, mournfully, up.

The screams went on and on.

And across the city, atop a monolithic wedge of
seamless, mirror-smooth metal, a statue stirred, as though awakened by the
tumult, and slowly lifted its great horned head.

I mean...

Isn't that the most awesome, intriguing, curiosity peaking start to a story that you have ever read?

Laini Taylor is the author of the National Book Award Finalist
Lips Touch: Three Times, as well as the novels Blackbringer, Silksinger and the NYT bestselling trilogy Daughter of Smoke and Bone. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband, illustrator
Jim Di Bartolo, and their daughter.